To be completely fair. It's easy for Mike Ditka to say the risk isn't worth the reward now that he has made his money as an NFL football player, NFL football coach, successful businessman thanks to his NFL stardom, and a lucrative career as a television NFL football analyst and commentator. He already made his money and insured his future, so it's easy for him to say that now. He already has his reward. It's easy to tell everyone else to give up their dreams of becoming NFL stars and multi milliionaires when you've already done it and gotten yours.

If you could go back and explain all the risk to Iron Mike Ditka when he was 18 years old and before he accomplished anything, do you really think he would do one thing differently in his life?

I don't.

Very true, and good points. But like Atlanta Dan says, at 18 there is a lot you would say yes to, especially when it seems like the only way to achieve your dreams.

I'll ask you this though, if the 18 year old Ditka wouldn't have changed a thing, does that make the Ditka of today wrong? And if a hurricane named Ditka fought Coach Ditka, who would win?

_________________Have you ever wondered what you would look like frozen in carbonite?

Atlanta Dan

Posts : 2001Likes : 1635Join date : 2015-04-18

Subject: Re: Stabler had brain disease CTE Sat Feb 06, 2016 5:08 pm

NFL representatives apparently possessed by the spirit of the tobacco industry this week

At a Feb. 4 event Dr. Mitchel Berger, a neurosurgeon at the University of California, San Francisco and a member of the NFL’s Head, Neck and Spine Committee, was asked by Toronto Star columnist Bruce Arthur if there’s a link between football and degenerative brain disorders. “No,” Berger said, in a response that harkened back to the NFL’s pre-2009 League of Denial days, when a league medical advisor refused to acknowledge that multiple head injuries sustained in football were linked with depression, dementia, or other cognitive problems....

Berger said he told Arthur there was no link between football and degenerative brain disorders because, in Berger’s mind, the word link means “a one to one relationship between playing and getting CTE.” So for Berger, saying football is “linked” to CTE is the equivalent of saying “if you play football, you will get CTE.”

Link to full article

http://time.com/4210564/nfl-super-bowl-brain-trauma-cte/?xid=homepage

Chris Nowinski didn’t intend to talk to the press; he just dropped by to hear what the National Football League had to say these days about brain injuries, about concussions, about the neurological disease known as CTE. Nowinski is the co-founder and executive director of the Concussion Legacy Foundation, the leading concussion advocacy organization in America. He just wanted to listen.

He was astonished.

“I sort of feel like I’m re-living big tobacco in real time,” said Nowinski, after watching an NFL-affiliated doctor refuse to speak about the connection between football and CTE, or chronic traumatic encephalopathy.